S60Tips.com

Plaxo is my favorite contacts management. It allows us to sync our contacts with many popular applications, including Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, as well as online services, including Microsoft Live/Hotmail, Yahoo!, Google/GMail and even LinkedIn.

How about S60 devices? Since Plaxo does not support SyncML yet, it is not that easy to sync our S60 devices with Plaxo.

There should be a limited support on some S60 devices from the US operators. Unfortunately, I haven’t tried it because I don’t live in the US.

There is a third party application, called Sync2App for Plaxo (Series 60). Unfortunately, it doesn’t come for free. Besides that, it supports only older version of S60, i.e. 1st and 2nd Edition only.

What can we do with Plaxo from our S60 now? Until Plaxo supports SyncML, there is not much we can do.

One solution that we can try now is sync Plaxo with Outlook and then sync Outlook with our S60 devices. It is not perfect; but it should do the job.

Bonus Links

• Contacts Management and Online Backup
• Anything About Synchronization

Contacts synchronization is always one of the hottest topic in the mobile device. There are basically two ways of doing contacts synchronization, i.e.

• Offline; meaning you don’t need Internet connection to do synchronization.
• Online; meaning your contacts are backup to an online server.

Offline

• Microsoft Outlook. I am pretty sure that many of you have been using PC Suite to synchronize your contacts to Microsoft Outlook. The latest PC Suite even supports synchronization to Windows Vista contacts.
• Apple’s Mac. Mac users may also be familiar with iSync. Personally I’ve never tried iSync yet because I don’t have Mac. However, I heard that this product is awesome; just like any other Apple’s products.
• Mozilla Thunderbird. There were some discussions about contacts synchronization to Mozilla Thunderbird. Until today, I haven’t managed to synchronize between S60 devices and Thunderbird. There is a product, called NokSync to synchronize Nokia phones. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with S60 devices.

Online

Online backup for contacts is getting increasingly more popular these days. There are many companies out there that are providing online backup service. My favorite online backup services are:

• Plaxo
• Zyb
• Mobical

Plaxo uses proprietary protocol for synchronization; while the other two, Zyb and Mobilcal, supports SyncML. For those who are not familiar with SyncML, it is a platform independent information synchronization standard from OMA (Open Mobile Alliance).

I am going to discuss online backup in the next postings. So… stay tune…

Bonus Links

• Contacts Synchronization with Plaxo
• Anything About Synchronization
• It is getting easier to sync your cell phone with Linux box

Update (01-Oct-2007): Added some bonus links.

One of the new features of Nokia PC Suite 6.84 is files synchronization. Before this new version is released, actually there are a couple of ways of doing files synchronization. A couple of months back, I have written about All About Synchronization that discussed Allway Sync ?n? Go. Recently I found another free third party application, SyncBack from 2BrightSparks, to do synchronization.

Now I am going to discuss about files synchronization in PC Suite 6.84. If you run the new PC Suite and select Synchronize, you should see a checkbox, called ?File and folder items?. Enable this checkbox to allow files synchronization.

Then on the Files and Folders tab, you can set the source and destination folders. Since, you can only specify one folder here, let?s utilize Briefcase feature from Windows. For those who don?t know about Briefcase in Windows, please read the following tutorial from Microsoft.

What you need to do is:

• Create a Briefcase folder on your Windows PC.
• Copy any files you want to synchronize to this folder.
• Run Synchronize application from PC Suite.
• Click Synchronize button and you are ready to go. Note that you can also automate the synchronization each time you connect the device. To do it, simply click Advanced button in the General tab.

Tip: Add Briefcase folder to your Send To menu. This way, you can copy files to the Briefcase folder just by right clicking on it and select Send To menu.